Below, I could hear Jere lifting the escaped chick from the water and climbing back up to us. But oh dear now we had attracted the attention of the parents. Like the ominous line in the film Jurassic Park, where there’s a baby, there’s always a mother not far away. And this mother could not have been more Jurassic. She swooped over us, her massive wingspan all velocity and threat; ear tufts laid flat, she had perfect aim, whooshing, primary flight feathers splayed, warning us, her anxious yelping cry echoing around the quarry, her beak snapping. Nearly noiseless in her flight, her upper coverts densely dark brown, with her soft wingbeats the light fell beige and gold through her feathers. She swooped back again, this time on Jere, skimming over the top of his hat in a final warning fly-by. We placed the ringed chicks safely back on their ledge and the mother owl glided away, landing in a tall pine a few yards distant. From where we stood, I could see her heavily streaked front and barred tail. She perched there, anxious, ear tufts more erect in alarm, waiting for us to depart.
Slightly nervous, I asked Jere whether he’d ever been hurt by an owl.
‘Yes, once or twice.’
One time, he told me, he went to fit a radio tracking transmitter to some Eagle Owls on his own at night. This seemed daredevil, but not out of character. Jere was clearly experienced and he knew what he was doing, but even the best of us can misjudge. He waited for dusk, set up the mist net and waited, and when the owl came it was a big female. She was caught by the wing and furious, flapping and struggling; it was then that he made his mistake. In order to disentangle her he held her by the free wing and instantly her talons sank into him; one set deep in his arm, the other locked in his thigh.
‘It was a mess. Blood everywhere. You can’t force the bird to let go. I just had to release the wing, bleed and wait. It was incredibly painful.’
‘Is that the only time?’
‘Another time I was ringing some chicks and a mad male with one eye, who was huge, punched me in the back by flying in from behind – he hit me so hard and his aim was great, he knocked me right over.’
Our final chick of the day was harder to find. But I discovered that once Jere had got started, he wouldn’t give in easily. We walked a good distance into the woods; the reindeer moss and lichen crinkled and crunched, dry as biscuit beneath our feet. Jere searched for the signs: the faecal posts and plucking sites that he knew would eventually lead us to our quarry. There was no path so we wended our way into the trees, but Jere knew the woods well, I was sure. Even so, this place was hard to navigate. Hilly, with deep tree-covered ravines, and in places difficult to traverse with brambles, bilberry and broom everywhere presenting barriers to wade through or find a way around. I saw crested tits (tick!) whittering together in the high pine branches and wondered at the thick sponge-like carpet that crisped and crackled beneath us. Our footfall made it impossible to be silent, and together we sounded like giants crunching through heaps of cornflakes.
Jere scampered down a cliff again, and I waited in a clearing; partly I was afraid to wander away from it as I would surely get lost, but it also meant that I could see any animals coming. For what seemed like half an hour I stood, alone in the sunlight of the glade, amongst the hot stillness, gazing at the magnificence of these woods. Jere had gone so far that I could no longer see him, and when I peered into the ravine into which he was last seen clambering there was no sign of him. Suddenly these dry woods seemed less friendly: all around viridian saplings thrust upward toward the light, bilberry leaves lay thick on low-slung bushes, the sun battered everything: lichen, moss, pines and earth. There was not a breath of wind, the forest was crinkle-dry; smells of pine and drought rise in the heat; my water had run out and I had not paid attention to any water source or even about the way back to the track. I was alone and unprepared; a mixture of fear and wonder began to rise up my legs. My ancestors knew how to survive here; I did not. So quickly disorientated, I wouldn’t have stood a chance! Just as my heartbeat began to up its tempo, Jere sprouted elf-like from the rim of a cliff, grinning proud as a new dad, carrying a whopping and very snappy young female owl. Those huge eyes! They burned like torches. Then there were her amazing white, scaly feet. They were huge. And tipped with a savage cluster of sabre-like talons. She stretched them out in front of her body, grasping, hissing.
‘Do you want to hold her?’ Jere asked, a slight giggle in his voice as we both marvelled at this fierce wonder-baby of the woods. She was barely a fledgling at only eight weeks old, but she could have done some serious damage if mishandled. I gripped her as firmly as I could, and snuggled her into the crook of my arm, where she vibrated with energy and alarm. In a week or two she would be away, flying into her new life of slaughtering voles, rabbits, owls, crows and hedgehogs.
A woodpecker cried suddenly, indicating the return of the parents. All around us, a flurry of alarm jittered through the branches. One of the parents was close; I felt the back of me prickle. Would they go for us? Perhaps not in the daytime. But we couldn’t see them coming in these thick woods; only the birds knew where they were and made a fine show of pointing that out.
As I looked up and scanned into the branches above us, something mottled, ear tufts silhouetted, stared distrustfully down at us. It was the male; slightly smaller than the female, but no less dangerous. He exuded threat, his huge claws gripping the branch. I could even see his soft white eyelids. He clacked his beak and I thought of the snapped spines of rabbits, foxes, other birds of prey, all of which might fight back – but none of which would stand a chance against this supreme predator and its talons.
‘This pair may have been nesting here for fifteen or even twenty springs,’ Jere told me, ‘and these are great parents.’ The Eagle Owl can be long-lived in spite of its vulnerability. They can live for twenty years in the wild, or even longer, and maybe twice that in captivity. All that experience forms something akin to wisdom, but not the human sort. It is owl knowledge: how to hunt and feed; how to attract and keep a mate; how to be vigilant; how to defend a territory, protect a family. When to be still, and when to fly. I understand, now, how the owl might have absorbed both ideas, wisdom and evil in the human mind. Had the natural evolutionary requirement to protect its young been misconstrued as aggression or evil by our forebears? It would not hesitate to strike if it felt the need, and yet, we both knew this would be a last resort. It is not wise for a predator to risk injury. I watched the glare, the restrained potential of menace. Its amber-orange eyes smouldered.
Jere placed the precious cargo snugly back into her mossy cavity in the shade of pine saplings and we withdrew before she could lunge at his leather boots. Above us, the parent looked no less enraged. Tiny dust motes and wisps of owl down floated up through the warm air at our retreat, trailing behind us as we moved away into the lichen-clad woods.
*
I made it to Vincenzo’s patch in Spain in the end, or near enough. It was October, and he wasn’t there, but his owls were. In one swoop I had travelled from the Eagle Owls’ northern-most reaches to the southern, and in Extremadura, at the Monfragüe National Park nature reserve, my guide Martin Kelsey said we’d only have to wait. I’d come all the way to see the National Park, set within a very special larger Biosphere Reserve, an area of forests, gorges, lakes and savannah with a rocky, Mediterranean landscape. Not only did this place provide a rich habitat for Eagle Owls and Spanish imperial eagles but also something very special: a rare population of Europe’s largest carrion-feeding raptor: the black vulture. Extremadura, a sparsely populated area more than twice the size of Wales, presents a vast habitat for vultures; the human population of 1 million coexists with the wildlife through traditional, low-impact agriculture.
The Biosphere Reserve around Monfragüe is an important buffer zone encircling the entire National Park. Rich in patchwork habitats for mammals, birds and insects, the sunblasted land of the Biosphere is scattered with meadows, wild olive, holm and cork oaks that sustain the rural community and the wildlife alike. A never-ending w
hispering carpet, the autumnal grasslands appeared to be made of withered gold, a mass of crisp, sculptural grasses and filigree thistles that fragmented underfoot: cardoon thistles, herbs, wild carrot, silvery broom and wisps of willow, and when I looked closer into the woven tawny-blond thatch, dotted all through were the delicate white bells of autumn snowflakes. We found lizards, tiny green geckos; the crisp shed skin of a Montpellier snake; praying mantis, a host of dragonflies, tiny white butterflies, and a hunting tiger spider. But over and above that, drifting in and out of the National Park and over the sweeping pastures of the Biosphere, ignoring the human lines and boundaries, on invisible updraughts of warm air circled the vultures.
With their spine-tingling wingspans of nearly 3 metres these are one of Europe’s rarest, and hugest, birds of prey. They soared high above us, massive wings bowing under their own weight, gliding almost as if in slow motion. Our necks ached in awe and amazement.
Human activity in Extremadura has benefited top predators like the Eagle Owl and the vulture. With livestock grazing on the vast dehesas, the open oak pastures, and on the large hunting estates in winter, animals roam freely; the meadows are packed with rabbits and small rodents, and scattered with remains especially from deer and boar that are readily consumed by the vultures. The two raptors inhabit different ecological niches, the owls here nesting in the plentiful cliffs and sometimes very tall buildings, and the black vultures in tall trees. The Eagle Owl will prey on just about anything live; the black vultures evolved to feed on small prey and carrion such as rabbits, while griffon vultures, also to be found here, can pour in from high crags to disintegrate a deer carcass in minutes. The black vultures will feed on the scattered morsels that the griffons leave. Each one fits into its own cavity in the ecosystem. Because of increased livestock and hunting there has been a dramatic surge in the population size of the black vultures, categorised as near-threatened in other parts of the world, and in forty years they have increased from about 90 to over 900 pairs in Extremadura. In the Monfragüe National Park alone there are over 300 pairs, creating the world’s highest density of this endangered bird.
After months of drought, the landscape of sun-blasted pasture was speckled deep green with evergreen oaks. These cork and holm oak pastures thrive by the Monfragüe syncline, crumpled ridges of 500-million-year-old quartzites that form silver-green crags thrust skyward. We walked from the village of Serradilla towards Mirabel, where whitewashed terracotta-tiled homes nestled beneath a ruined castle perched on beetling cliffs. The wildlife does well here, but the surrounding human settlements are declining as the 50 per cent unemployed population of young people leaves to find work. With their allotments, Iberian pigs, chickens and curious donkeys, the towns had a nearly forgotten feel. But the rich birdlife (we saw flocks of Spanish sparrows, crested larks and many other finches; black redstarts and a hoopoe flew up as we passed), including such rarities as the Eagle Owls and vultures, present the region with an exciting natural capital of wonders, and vast potential in terms of birding tourism. If only areas like Monfragüe and the Biosphere reserve with their tiny unspoiled villages and traditional settlements like Serradilla and Mirabel were more widely known about, more birders would come, and it would inject a much-needed economic boost of eco-tourism into the faltering local economy.
All around, the cork oak forests thronged with birds; these gnarly trees stood out from the holm oaks with their flayed red hides, as if they were sore after the cork bark had been carefully stripped. But it is all done sensitively, so that the tree can sustain itself and recover its protective coating. We walked to the castle of Mirabel, then down through the cork oak groves, and proud among them stood a ‘singular’ tree, a veteran with its very own information board. This was the Padre Santo (Holy Father) oak, estimated to be 900 years old. It had witnessed the whole history of the castle above it, its trunk moulded by generations of cork harvesting. Reddened to the reach of the corking blade, the trunk’s forked branches became fissured higher up and its nooks and crannies were feathered with a thousand years of lichen.
The multiplicity of bird voices in these groves is what makes them so unique and special, and it stays with me still. The high twittering calls of a million birds, resounding about the trees and over the sun-gilded herbs and grass, reminds of a lost time, before so many species were threatened. But the highlight was to come. As we waited by the Tiétar river at dusk, Martin brought us to see what I had been hoping for. He said we’d know where the owls were by the call. By the tall cliffs of the river we focused our telescopes, scanned, watched, waited. As the hours passed, the sun went down. We waited. And waited. The gentle evening slid its shadows down the valley and over the bend in the river, and our sense of hearing began to take precedence. Bats flitted around our heads, their high-pitched piping, their echolocation call, felt close to our faces, and was as disconcerting as it was invisible.
Búho real, the Spanish call it. The royal owl. A small group of local people gathered together with us, and they watched us as we watched.
‘Buuu-hu,’ we heard just as the light had almost entirely disappeared. It came from somewhere up on the ridge, high above the river.
El búho! the Spanish people called excitedly, as if in reply. El búho! The owl! We fixed our telescopes on the cliffs above the water and tried to focus on her, searching as they asked: Donde esta el búho? Where is she? Where is the owl?
In the dark we could not tell whether this was Bubo bubo, or Bubo bubo hispanus, the paler version of the nominate species, one of twenty subspecies of this super-predator. But there she was, tucked inside a crook in the cliff, a shadow within a shadow.
The owl called softly at first, breathy and unsure as if this was just a whisper on waking. Dusk was falling around us, and invisible amongst the quartzite rock face and the tangle of stunted oaks and broom she was muffled, as if calling from inside a crevasse or the knotty branches of a tree.
‘Buuu-hu?’ the melancholy call came again. Its deep, plaintive note tumbled from the rocks and down to the water. Every two minutes or so, regular now, as if the voice was pulling a shawl of darkness over the ravine and veiling our eyes.
‘Buuu-hu.’ Louder now. Even the river was losing its light, and this time a shoal of goose pimples swam along my arms. My earsight became more and more acute as the darkness deepened.
A fox shrieked, answered by a voice that might have been its echo, a rival, or a mate. A stag bellowed; this was the rut, and as well as the dark, the cooler night temperature brought something feral, a scent of something other, a musky surge, perhaps the stags’ testosterone. And rising from the flanks of the valley where the male deer searched came a scent from the does hidden in nearby scrubland and fields.
Then the owl swooped, reflected in the barest glimmer in the river’s surface. ‘Buuu-hu.’ There she was, an owl silhouette flying up to perch on the crest of the ridge; hefty, backlit by the indigo glow in the sky, glimmering, a jut of rock where there was no rock.
Her head turned, her tall ear tufts starkly outlined. I could just make out the pale throat patch, and the ear tufts, not quite erect, drooping at an angle. Where was the male? There was no answer to her call.
‘Buuuu-hu.’ She shuffled her position, tensed her body, wings at the ready, shoulders taut. She was preparing to take off, about to fly. We held our breath. Then her wings opened and like a giant moth she glided away into the black, swooped around and reappeared on the skyline. As she called, her whole body was held at an angle of 45 degrees. ‘I am here – where are you? I am here – where are you?’ she seemed to say.
She held her head forward, her body at an angle, throat puffed and ruffled. Her plaintive voice became more forceful and urgent now.
‘Buuuu-hu.’ Her head turned this way and that, ear tufts up as she searched. One last call, in the dark, but her soft booming was unanswered: ‘Buuuu-hu. I am here, where are you?’
Nothing came back to her out of the dark. The night was wrapped around her. Scent
s of pine and broom lay in silky layers, softening the quiet, hushing our feet, our breath. The shallows riffled and the ridge was silent. Between the rough bushes and over the shrubs the owl’s voice vanished into the night:
‘I am here – where are you? I am here – where are you?’
In the end it wasn’t the size of the Eagle Owl that had astounded me, but its vulnerability. There was something terribly lonely about the solitary boom of its call. I had come so far to find that it seemed as if these fearsome creatures need something none of us can really do without: family. Although solitary for much of the time, they shared that with us. Without family, we are nothing.
Glaucidium passerinum
PYGMY OWL
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
Owl Sense Page 23